Men started making glassware along Pierce Avenue in Lancaster, Ohio, in 1905. That was when Ike Collins and his business partners fired up a small furnace to melt silica and other minerals inside The Hocking Glass Company near the banks of the Hocking River. Locals were soon calling the outfit “The Hockin’.”

There were other glass companies in Lancaster, drawn there by cheap natural gas. But following a 1937 merger with the New York-based Anchor Cap and Closure, The Hockin’, now Anchor Hocking, grew into the world’s largest manufacturer of glass tableware and the second-largest maker of glass containers such as beer bottles and peanut-butter jars. It even played a role in the invention of late-night TV, in 1950, by sponsoring the pioneering NBC show Broadway Open House. Anchor Hocking became Lancaster’s largest employer by far, the rare Fortune 500 company based in a small town. At its peak, it employed roughly 5,000 people there, including executives in the headquarters, and many more in plants around the country.

But then came the 1980s. Since the start of the Reagan administration, Anchor Hocking has undergone a series of staggering transformations as a result of the financial manipulation that has come to define the American economy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Carl Icahn bought up shares and demanded a board seat and other changes, then agreed to leave the company alone after being allowed to sell back his ownership stake at a premium—a practice commonly referred to as “greenmailing.” Then, Anchor Hocking was purchased in a leveraged hostile takeover by Newell Corporation. After Newell’s own near-disastrous merger with Rubbermaid, Anchor Hocking was sold off in a debt-financed buyout to the huge private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management. The company promptly fell into bankruptcy, out of which it was sold in another debt-financed buyout to a much smaller private-equity firm called Monomoy Capital Partners. There was a forced marriage with the silverware company Oneida, then an initial public offering after which the stock soon tanked. In quick succession came a shutdown, a notice (in accordance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) that the place might close for good, a second bankruptcy during which the former creditors became the equity owners, and countless leadership rotations. During the past 15 years, it’s had three different corporate owners. In January the company’s name was changed from EveryWare Global to The Oneida Group.

Even after all this, they still make glass in Plant 1, the plant Ike Collins started, and roughly 900 people still have jobs in Lancaster. But the factory has been poorly maintained and the people who work there have seen their wages and benefits walked back so that now some make just about what they made, or less, adjusted for inflation, than they did back when the saga began. In 1985, that was roughly $10 per hour for a 20-year, high-level employee, or about $22.50 in today’s dollars.

The poor maintenance, the wages and benefits, and the drastic job cuts are only the most obvious costs. The spiritual damage may be more profound. Recently I sat in the small living room of a Lancaster glassman who works in Plant 1 and asked him if he knew which company currently owned Anchor Hocking. The last I knew, after the 2015 bankruptcy the ownership group consisted of former lenders that aren’t in the business of running a glass manufacturer. The company was for sale. I wondered if there’d been some ownership consolidation, and my query to the company went unanswered.

“I think it’s Monomoy,” the glassman said. It wasn’t Monomoy. I wasn’t surprised by his reply, though. Keeping track of who owned what, or even the name of the parent company, is exhausting. Many employees have mentally disconnected from their employer in an effort to tune out the turmoil. None had any idea, for example, of the dividend recapitalizations the company had performed that benefited the private-equity sponsors and increased the company’s debt burden. They had no idea what a dividend recap was. Some didn’t know a CEO had been fired until weeks after the fact. Better, they thought, to put their heads down, do their work, go home, collect a check. If the furnaces were blazing when workers showed up for their shift, they had a job.

“Stability has been replaced by chaos,” Shannon Monnat, a sociologist and demographer at Penn State University who researches the interplay between economics and health, says of such situations. The longer the stress lasts, whether it involves family, community, or work, the more disheartened people become and the more faith they lose in the system, until, finally, they disconnect to survive.

Monnat has recently been studying “diseases of despair”—the plague of opioid addiction, alcoholism, and suicide afflicting places like Lancaster. She’s found that instability at work is strongly correlated with the prevalence of these problems as well as with social and family breakdown. Drug abuse is not solely due to the cheap availability of heroin or meth, nor some imagined weakness of the working class. Monnat believes it’s also caused by people’s loss of faith that they each occupy an important place in the American system.

In Lancaster, the transition from stability to chaos seemed to happen fast, in about three decades, so many can still recall when the city was prosperous and predictable for people like the Plant 1 workers. In those days, the biggest criticism of the town was how boring it was. Lancaster was a cohesive community—a trait not lost entirely, thanks to the devotion many local people still feel—where social classes mixed and executives, from the founders to middle management, all lived in town. Their kids went to school with the factory workers’ kids.

Workers didn’t work only to earn a check. Anchor Hocking’s employees believed they were part of Lancaster’s social web, and the nation’s. But the respect workers once felt emanating from the world around them has largely disappeared. One day in the summer of 2015, I sat in on a meeting between labor and management where a woman spoke up to ask about the 401(k) plan. (Anchor Hocking’s defined-benefit pension plan was switched to a 401(k) long ago.) The company had stopped making contributions to workers’ 401(k) accounts in 2014 when the plant shut down during a fiscal crisis prompted in part by all the private-equity financial engineering.

The worker said she’d heard or read somewhere that, now that the Great Recession was over, employees at banks had once again begun receiving 401(k) matches from their employers. Referring to the lenders-turned-equity-holders, she asked, weren’t she and her fellow workers now bank employees, too? Shouldn’t they get their 401(k) matches back? She didn’t know which employees of which banks were receiving matching contributions, but it didn’t matter anyway, because EveryWare was not owned by banks, but other finance firms like Nationwide and Voya Financial. There was a giant, gray system hovering somewhere, out there, and she had no idea where, how, or even if, she fit into it.

“New hires can get a 401(k) at McDonald’s,” one man piped up. Was it any wonder Plant 1 couldn’t attract skilled millwrights? (A new contract signed last fall re-instituted 401(k) contributions for some employees.)

As the publication date of my book about Lancaster and Anchor Hocking, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town, approached, the company’s employees had been warned via a company memo not to speak to me, or any journalists, so their identities have been kept anonymous here. (Some of the workers’ statements in this article also appeared in Glass House.) When asked about the company’s current status and plans for the future, Erika Schoenberger, The Oneida Group’s general counsel, declined to provide any details, “many of which,” she said, “remain confidential.” She only offered that Oneida is “proud of our heritage and our people” and “concentrated on strategic initiatives to build a successful future for our company and our communities.”

Weighed down by the powerful feeling that they aren’t valued, many workers are left to mark the passing of time. “These are the working-class people more likely than everybody else to have retirement countdown clocks on cell phones,” Monnat says of laborers like those at Anchor Hocking. “There’s no sense of meaning.” The American Flint Glass Workers Union, which represents some of Anchor Hocking’s factory workers, was forced to fold itself into the United Steelworkers in an attempt to maintain at least some bargaining power. But there’s precious little of that left because the workers know that at any time the plant could shut down. Production could be moved, possibly to another country.

In late February, employees were informed that The Oneida Group was contracting with the India-based outsourcer Infosys to handle customer-service functions currently based in Lancaster. The word “layoffs” did not come up in the announcement, but the implication was clear enough: They were disposable workers. “It’s tough for those people in customer service,” one salaried employee told me. Speaking of the community spirit that extended from the company into the town itself, the employee said, “It’s really heartbreaking. A lot of them have known each other for 30 years, grew up with each other.”

I asked this employee what might have been if Anchor Hocking had not been subject to the whims of the financial engineers. “I can’t help but think if things had been different, if some money had been put into machinery, product development, training, that we’d be in better shape.” Counterfactuals are hard to prove, of course. But Anchor Hocking’s longtime rival, Libbey, based in Toledo, Ohio, is still in business as a public company and still making money, despite having spent years under the ownership of the private-equity giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts when KKR owned the container company Owens-Illinois; Libbey had been spun out from Owens-Illinois in 1993 and a former Anchor Hocking executive now runs it.

Lancaster’s decline, then, wasn’t the result of some sort of natural and inevitable evolution of technology, like the demise of the buggy-whip industry, nor of the pressures of free trade and offshoring, as intense as those have been. It is the culmination of a series of decisions over a period of roughly 35 years. As one former CEO of EveryWare Global told me, “It’s not about making the product. It’s about making money appear and the 99 percent doesn’t understand that.” The Plant 1 employees certainly don’t. They only know that the old social contract has disintegrated and that nothing has come to take its place.

Back in 1984, A. Bartlett Giammatti, who was then the president of Yale University, and who would later become the commissioner of Major League Baseball, warned that the tide of deal-making and the financialization of the economy could lead to disillusionment and drift as “the impulse to private gain has nothing to connect itself to except itself.” As Chris Nagle, a union leader in Plant 1, said to me in answer to my question about which presidential candidate his fellow union members seemed to prefer, “We don’t like anybody.”

Those who voted for Donald Trump, the salaried employee suggested, did so not out of enthusiasm, but out of this very disconnect. “People are grasping for anything,” he said. What many didn’t know, and may still not, was that two of the men who played such a large role in shaping Anchor Hocking’s history—Carl Icahn and Stephen Feinberg, the founder of Cerberus—have been confidants of Trump and helped get him elected.

Most Popular

Congressional Republicans and conservative pundits had the chance to signal Trump his attacks on law enforcement are unacceptable—but they sent the opposite message.

President Trump raged at his TV on Sunday morning. And yet on balance, he had a pretty good weekend. He got a measure of revenge upon the hated FBI, firing former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe two days before his pension vested. He successfully coerced his balky attorney general, Jeff Sessions, into speeding up the FBI’s processes to enable the firing before McCabe’s retirement date.

Beyond this vindictive fun for the president, he achieved something politically important. The Trump administration is offering a not very convincing story about the McCabe firing. It is insisting that the decision was taken internally by the Department of Justice, and that the president’s repeated and emphatic demands—public and private—had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

The first female speaker of the House has become the most effec­tive congressional leader of modern times—and, not coinciden­tally, the most vilified.

Last May, TheWashington Post’s James Hohmann noted “an uncovered dynamic” that helped explain the GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare. Three current Democratic House members had opposed the Affordable Care Act when it first passed. Twelve Democratic House members represent districts that Donald Trump won. Yet none voted for repeal. The “uncovered dynamic,” Hohmann suggested, was Nancy Pelosi’s skill at keeping her party in line.

She’s been keeping it in line for more than a decade. In 2005, George W. Bush launched his second presidential term with an aggressive push to partially privatize Social Security. For nine months, Republicans demanded that Democrats admit the retirement system was in crisis and offer their own program to change it. Pelosi refused. Democratic members of Congress hosted more than 1,000 town-hall meetings to rally opposition to privatization. That fall, Republicans backed down, and Bush’s second term never recovered.

Invented centuries ago in France, the bidet has never taken off in the States. That might be changing.

“It’s been completely Americanized!” my host declares proudly. “The bidet is gone!” In my time as a travel editor, this scenario has become common when touring improvements to hotels and resorts around the world. My heart sinks when I hear it. To me, this doesn’t feel like progress, but prejudice.

Americans seem especially baffled by these basins. Even seasoned American travelers are unsure of their purpose: One globe-trotter asked me, “Why do the bathrooms in this hotel have both toilets and urinals?” And even if they understand the bidet’s function, Americans often fail to see its appeal. Attempts to popularize the bidet in the United States have failed before, but recent efforts continue—and perhaps they might even succeed in bringing this Old World device to new backsides.

As the Trump presidency approaches a troubling tipping point, it’s time to find the right term for what’s happening to democracy.

Here is something that, even on its own, is astonishing: The president of the United States demanded the firing of the former FBI deputy director, a career civil servant, after tormenting him both publicly and privately—and it worked.

The American public still doesn’t know in any detail what Andrew McCabe, who was dismissed late Friday night, is supposed to have done. But citizens can see exactly what Donald Trump did to McCabe. And the president’s actions are corroding the independence that a healthy constitutional democracy needs in its law enforcement and intelligence apparatus.

McCabe’s firing is part of a pattern. It follows the summary removal of the previous FBI director and comes amid Trump’s repeated threats to fire the attorney general, the deputy attorney, and the special counsel who is investigating him and his associates. McCabe’s ouster unfolded against a chaotic political backdrop which includes Trump’s repeated calls for investigations of his political opponents, demands of loyalty from senior law enforcement officials, and declarations that the job of those officials is to protect him from investigation.

How evangelicals, once culturally confident, became an anxious minority seeking political protection from the least traditionally religious president in living memory

One of the most extraordinary things about our current politics—really, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political history—is the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump. The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received.

Trump’s background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and leadership. Trump’s past political stances (he once supported the right to partial-birth abortion), his character (he has bragged about sexually assaulting women), and even his language (he introduced the words pussy and shithole into presidential discourse) would more naturally lead religious conservatives toward exorcism than alliance. This is a man who has cruelly publicized his infidelities, made disturbing sexual comments about his elder daughter, and boasted about the size of his penis on the debate stage. His lawyer reportedly arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star to dissuade her from disclosing an alleged affair. Yet religious conservatives who once blanched at PG-13 public standards now yawn at such NC-17 maneuvers. We are a long way from The Book of Virtues.

Much more than time separates the 27th president from the 45th: from their vastly different views on economics, to their conceptions of the presidency itself.

As Donald Trump’s executive orders punishing steel and aluminum imports threaten a trade war around the globe, Republicans on Capitol Hill are debating whether to reassert Congress’s ultimate constitutional authority over tariffs and trade. This isn’t the first time the GOP has split itself in two on the question of protective tariffs. But the last time, just over 100 years ago, the Republican president’s policies were the exact opposite of Trump’s.

William Howard Taft—in his opposition to populism and protectionism, as well as his devotion to constitutional limits on the powers of the presidency—was essentially the anti-Trump. Unlike the current president, and his own predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft refused to rule by executive order, insisting that the chief executive could only exercise those powers that the Constitution explicitly authorizes.

Among the more practical advice that can be offered to international travelers is wisdom of the bathroom. So let me say, as someone who recently returned from China, that you should be prepared to one, carry your own toilet paper and two, practice your squat.

I do not mean those goofy chairless sits you see at the gym. No, toned glutes will not save you here. I mean the deep squat, where you plop your butt down as far as it can go while staying aloft and balanced on the heels. This position—in contrast to deep squatting on your toes as most Americans naturally attempt instead—is so stable that people in China can hold it for minutes and perhaps even hours ...

The debate around sexual-harassment legislation is playing out in the Maryland General Assembly, where reform advocates say leadership is loath to embrace changes.

In Maryland, legislative sessions run 90 days, from January through early April. On the final day of each session—commonly referred to by the Latin term sine die—the capital city of Annapolis lets its hair down. There is dining and dancing and parties galore as aides, lawmakers, and lobbyists celebrate having survived the season.

A few years back, at one sine die soiree hosted by a legislator, a former Annapolis aide (who requested anonymity because she remains involved in Maryland politics) took to the dance floor. “I was dancing a little bit by myself,” she recalled. “All of a sudden I hear, ‘You’re packing a little bit more than I thought back here!’ I turn around, and this legislator is dancing right behind me. I was like, ‘Ooookay. This is a little weird. I know your wife and kids.’ So I tried to subtly move away.” The legislator followed, recalled the ex-aide. And then: “He got aroused.” The young woman made a swift escape, and, she informed me, “I have not spoken to that legislator one-on-one since.”

Scholars have been sounding the alarm about data-harvesting firms for nearly a decade. The latest Cambridge Analytica scandal shows it may be too late to stop them.

On Friday night, Facebook suspended the account of Cambridge Analytica, the political-data company backed by the billionaire Robert Mercer that consulted on both the Brexit and Trump campaigns.

The action came just before The Guardian and The New York Timesdropped major reports in which the whistle-blower Christopher Wylie alleged that Cambridge Analytica had used data that an academic had allegedly improperly exfiltrated from the social network. These new stories, backed by Wylie’s account and internal documents, followed years of reporting by The Guardianand The Intercept about the possible problem.

The details could seem Byzantine. Aleksandr Kogan, then a Cambridge academic, founded a company, Global Science Research, and immediately took on a major client, Strategic Communication Laboratories, which eventually gave birth to Cambridge Analytica. (Steve Bannon, an adviser to the company and a former senior adviser to Trump, reportedly picked the name.)

Although the former secretary of state’s contentious relationship with the president didn’t help matters, Tillerson’s management style left a department in disarray.

Rex Tillerson is hardly the first person to be targeted in a tweet from Donald Trump, but on Tuesday morning, he became the first Cabinet official to be fired by one. It was an ignominious end to Tillerson’s 13-month stint as secretary of state, a tenure that would have been undistinguished if it weren’t so entirely destructive.

Compared with expectations for other members of Trump’s Cabinet, the disastrous results of Tillerson’s time in office are somewhat surprising. Unlike the EPA’s Scott Pruitt, Tillerson did not have obvious antipathy for the department he headed; unlike HUD’s Ben Carson, he had professional experience that was relevant to the job; and unlike Education’s Betsy DeVos, his confirmation hearing wasn't a disaster.